I was placing some breaks on the board to create a fake outline (would be a good feature request to be able to define custom board shapes in the future) and I clicked close to the left edge of the window and got these errors. I tried closing them to continue with my project but they would keep popping up and prevent from doing anything else with veecad. I had to force close the program and now when I try to open the same project it gives the same error with a frozen project.

I can confirm this is repeatable with other projects by clicking right at the left edge of the window as well and they all end up corrupted. I can also upload a hijackthis log to verify my computer is not to blame.

Welcome to the forum, Devaski

Thanks for the error report. I can reproduce the fault here - if I select Break Track mode, and click on the leftmost board pixel (right next to the window border), I get an exception message.

I plan to fix this by:

• Fixing the Place Break code so the error does not occur.
• Adding code to shut down VeeCAD after displaying any error message. This will prevent saving a file once VeeCAD is compromised by an error.

It will be a few days before I can release a fix, so in the meantime, if you get an error message, please shut down VeeCAD without saving your project.

I am glad to hear that you rescued your work. This is a good moment to mention data protection to all our readers.

Our CAD documents contain:

• a record of our knowledge and experience
• a record of known good circuits
• useful starting points for improved or variant designs
• circuit portions we can borrow for other projects
• microprocessor code that took hours to write and debug

So keep your designs safe. Some tips:

• Keep each project in a separate folder. You can zip the folder and get the entire project - notes files, schematic, board and code.
• Get TWO USB hard drives and use them alternately to backup all your documents, emails. Remember, your computer might be dead tomorrow. I like SyncBackFree - http://www.2brightsparks.com/ - because your backup is easily verified and you can easily restore any file or all files.
• If you write serious code or do serious design work, get a VCS - version control system. I use Subversion via TortoiseSVN but others include Mercurial and Git. Lets you extract earlier versions of the project, recover from hard to find bugs, document your work. Many advantages you don't get from an ordinary backup.

Roger Lascelles wrote on Nov 29^th, 2013 at 3:07am:


Store important stuff on The Cloud.  I have used Dropbox (www.dropbox.com) ; for several years now and it has saved me some embarrassment from time to time.   It retains older versions of each file which can be very useful.   The first 2GBytes are free and 100GB costs  $10 a month.   Another advantage of Cloud storage is that you can work on the same files from different computers.